As I proposed in 1988: https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction.
        During the past semester, I have written one paper on this concept, entitled "The Self-Replicating Garden". Its thesis is that this concept provides a new metaphor for thinking about the relation between humans and the machinery that constitutes our political and technical support systems. Writing this paper has helped me organize my thinking and has given me a chance to explore the extensive literature relevant to the design of social and technological systems."

Still want to do it, but lots of distractions and small steps along the way.

On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements) see from me from 1999:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

and also from me in 2005:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting)"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
        So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ...
        My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Reprised in 2017:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

Jeff and I took the same physics class from Gerry O'Neill as Princeton... We have related goals, but we took different paths since then though...

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://www.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://tlc.ku.edu/
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

Not an anthropologist, but reading the news makes it appear that either psychopathic, obsessive minds with self-serving morality flourish in contemporary society, that and/or there are extremely powerful, cynical people who find and use them. Whether tech entrepreneurs have ever learned how to analyze literary works as opposed to just consuming them for entertainment is another good question. Likely it is a lack of imagination.. like an LLM what people ingest ends up percolating to the top of the mind. And, the dystopian solutions are the easiest. Contemporary tech and the money that builds it up seems to favor hierarchical structures that accumulate power to a central authority and so long as the people running it don't care about privacy or human dignity, anything goes. Tech is not yet advanced or altruistic enough to allow more people's ideas of what is moral to compete with that.

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.

GLWT. All my novels have wordplay and puns in them, none of which will translate.

Wow. I looked it up, and today I learned that it actually is available to non-seniors. I'm kind of surprised. Of course, the median wait time is measured in significant fractions of an hour, so even the elderly prefer to get rides from other people when they can. Either way, there's no advantage to a van that drives around and picks up one or two people at a time and takes them to their destination compared with a private car (and actually a huge disadvantage from a fuel economy perspective). It's just a glorified Über service, but with the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road.

My actual small town that I lived in until I was 22 currently has almost no houses within a twenty minute walk of any of the grocery stores. Maybe a few of the houses closest to the front of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods are close enough to Walmart. E.W. James (oops, that apparently just became a Save-A-Lot) is on a highway with almost no houses for probably a mile. Ruler Foods is within a mile of maybe a half dozen houses.

The Big Star store that went under in the 1980s (IIRC) was within walking distance of maybe a dozen mostly low-income houses, plus some university married student apartments, and *barely* within walking distance of some of the other university housing, but that has been gone for decades. The old E.W.'s was within walking distance of maybe low-double-digit houses before it moved across town in the late 1990s to where Ruler is now, and then again to its current location. IGA was also kind of near some houses, but again, that closed in the 80s or 90s when all the businesses moved to the west side of town to be near Walmart after it moved.

But even if you distributed them as evenly as you could, with only three real grocery stores, you'd still only have maybe 10% to 15% of residents within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store. At 850 people per square mile, you just can't sustain a lot of grocery stores. And that's before you factor in all the people out in the country. For that matter, my current city has trouble keeping more than about three grocery stores in business at anything approaching *bikeable* distances even with 7k people per square mile. The economies of scale just lend themselves to a smaller number of larger grocery stores, rather than a larger number of smaller stores.

Except that this isn't true. Yes, above a certain speed, you rapidly lose energy from wind resistance. But at lower speeds, you're not getting the maximum advantage of higher gears. That's why most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH. So lowering the maximum speed will NOT necessarily reduce emissions.

Here's a graph of a few vehicles' efficiency versus speed. Going significantly over 60 MPH usually results in a significant reduction in efficiency. Below that, though, you're just as likely to make emissions worse by slowing people down as you are to make it better. It depends entirely on what speeds just happen to be at the sweet spot in the torque curve of a particular engine with a particular gear ratio. You really can't fix the environment with that approach. All you'll do is make people late all the time.

Nit: To the best of my knowledge, there are no rare earth minerals in EV batteries. They are, however, used in a lot of EV *motors*. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, iron, etc. are anything but rare.

The full extent of the damage will take years to fully appreciate. That's half the reason people like him get elected. By the time the full extent of the damage is know, you're two presidential cycles later or even three.

It's really not *that* bad. They just have to sell them for more money. The tax credit doesn't magically make them unprofitable unless they haven't paid off the R&D costs. Otherwise, it just reduces their sales volume or forces them to take a lower profit per unit to keep the volume up.

It's stock. It's funny money.

Not at all true. The numbers are kind of nuts, but they are also tied to growth targets, so if Tesla doesn't grow, he doesn't get anything. It doesn't really devalue the shares, and this style of compensation scheme is pretty typical, though again, I won't argue that the numbers seem questionably high.

It already did, at least in the U.S. As soon as the tax credit expired, buying cratered. The company most likely to weather this is Tesla. Tesla already lost their tax credits, and their sales didn't crater before, so they probably won't crater this time, either.

But the rest of the industry? Dealers at the major car companies want to *avoid* selling EVs, because they don't get all that lucrative service business — oil changes and brake jobs and oxygen sensor replacements and so on. They have no incentive to sell EVs, and without tax credits to push people to choose EVs, sales dry up.

In other words, Ford ditching their electric trucks is *entirely* plausible. (I could maybe even see Tesla ditching the Cybertruck, because its sales suck for... let's just say design and implementation reasons.)

A *school* bus? Or a city bus? Because nowhere I've ever lived had school buses that took people home except at the end of the regular school day.

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled. Zero buses, zero *taxis*. You drove or you didn't get there. So I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is, but it sure as h*** doesn't match up with the decades that I lived in a rural area.

WTF are you talking about? You're talking about huge cities here. I'm talking about small town USA. So unless your idea of "different choices" means not living in a rural area (and good luck finding food on your table if everyone did that), you really don't know what you're talking about.

Sure. But my point was that trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas, and doesn't work well even in suburbs. That first part is not solvable by moving everyone to cities, because we still require food, and you can't grow that in a dense urban areas, because there's not enough arable land. And people live in suburbs precisely because they don't like living in cities, so eliminating cars in suburbs isn't going to fly, either.

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.